Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle ManLewis, Sinclair
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Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man
Lewis, Sinclair
Courtship -- Fiction; Love stories; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Middle-aged men -- United States -- Fiction
The play was a glorification of Yankee smartness. Mr. Wrenn was
disturbed by the fact that the swindler heroes robbed quite all the
others, but he was stirred by the brisk romance of money-making. The
swindlers were supermen—blonde beasts with card indices and options
instead of clubs. Not that Mr. Wrenn made any observations regarding
supermen. But when, by way of commercial genius, the swindler robbed a
young night clerk Mr. Wrenn whispered to Theresa, “Gee! he certainly
does know how to jolly them, heh?”
“Sh-h-h-h-h-h!” said Theresa.
Every one made millions, victims and all, in the last act, as a proof
of the social value of being a live American business man. As they
oozed along with the departing audience Mr. Wrenn gurgled:
“That makes me feel just like I’d been making a million dollars.”
Masterfully, he proposed, “Say, let’s go some place and have something
to eat.”
“All right.”
“Let’s—I almost feel as if I could afford Rector’s, after that play;
but, anyway, let’s go to Allaire’s.”
Though he was ashamed of himself for it afterward, he was almost
haughty toward his waiter, and ordered Welsh rabbits and beer quite as
though he usually breakfasted on them. He may even have strutted a
little as he hailed a car with an imaginary walking-stick. His parting
with Miss Theresa was intimate; he shook her hand warmly.
As he undressed he hoped that he had not been too abrupt with the
waiter, “poor cuss.” But he lay awake to think of Theresa’s hair and
hand-clasp; of polished desks and florid gentlemen who curtly summoned
bank-presidents and who had—he tossed the bedclothes about in his
struggle to get the word—who had a _punch!_
He would do that Great Traveling of his in the land of Big Business!
The five thousand princes of New York to protect themselves against the
four million ungrateful slaves had devised the sacred symbols of
dress-coats, large houses, and automobiles as the outward and visible
signs of the virtue of making money, to lure rebels into respectability
and teach them the social value of getting a dollar away from that
inhuman, socially injurious fiend, Some One Else. That Our Mr. Wrenn
should dream for dreaming’s sake was catastrophic; he might do things
because he wanted to, not because they were fashionable; whereupon,
police forces and the clergy would disband, Wall Street and Fifth
Avenue would go thundering down. Hence, for him were provided those Y.
M. C. A. night bookkeeping classes administered by solemn earnest men
of thirty for solemn credulous youths of twenty-nine; those sermons on
content; articles on “building up the rundown store by live
advertising”; Kiplingesque stories about playing the game; and
correspondence-school advertisements that shrieked, “Mount the ladder
to thorough knowledge—the path to power and to the fuller
pay-envelope.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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